[Callers] Another vote for "jets" and "rubies"

[Jeff Kaufman via Callers]

On Fri, Jan 27, 2017 at 11:40 AM, Ron Blechner via Callers
<callers at lists.sharedweight.net> wrote:
> To answer your question, though, about how many dancers want genderfree
> terms, at least ten dances are genderfree, and I bet we can poll those
> dances and find out how many active dancers they have. While the Western
> Mass one by me is a little low, dances like Brooklyn, Portland Maine, and
> Montpelier second Saturday boast very large crowds, and that's just ones
> I've personally attended. There's queer dance camps, too. Clearly there's a
> demand. I realize "huge" is a relative number, but we can safely agree on
> several thousand dancers as a safe low estimate of dancers who want gender
> free roles.

You're classifying everyone who attends a dance with gender-free
calling as having wanting it to be gender free, but I'm sure some are
attending in spite of it being gender free, and many more don't care
either way.

> These genderfree dances exist, some for 39 years, they've grown tremendously
> in the last 5 years *while many traditional dances are losing attendance*.

That's not what it looks like to me.  The particular dances that have
been gender free for a long time are mostly doing fine, but it doesn't
look to me like they're growing tremendously.  Instead, newer
fast-growing dances are either started as gender free or are switching
to it.  I don't think the causality goes the way you're suggesting.

> This isn't some existential threat to non-genderfree
> traditional dances. Let us talk.

Some pushback seems reasonable to me.  Just like I think people should
be able to dance either role at any contra dance, I think all contra
dances should move to being gender free.  Not immediately -- it's fine
to take some more time to consense on terms, have some brave dances
try them out, have callers get used to calling them -- but I do think
moving entirely to gender free terms is what we should be doing as a
community.

Jeff